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What is the most common neurological disorder?
Tension-type headaches and migraines.
Neurological disorders impact more than 1 in 3 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. There were about 2.2 billion cases of tension-type headaches worldwide in 2021 and about 1.1 billion cases of migraines.
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Illinois has a moldy state microbe. What is it?
Penicillium rubens strain NRRL 1951.
Why?
Alexander Fleming first observed Penicillium’s antibacterial effects in 1928 in England. But the work leading to large-scale production happened 4,000 miles away in Peoria, Illinois.
A decade after Fleming’s observation, Oxford pathologist Howard Florey and colleagues picked up on Fleming’s work and began testing penicillin in patients in 1941. They gave the first dose to a man with a life-threatening staph infection. The man’s condition improved dramatically, but within a week, the scientists’ penicillin supply ran out. When the infection returned, the patient died.
Florey and his colleagues needed to figure out how to mass produce the antibiotic. With much of Europe under attack during World War II, Florey traveled to the U.S. for help.
He ended up at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory (now called the USDA Agricultural Research Service) in Peoria, Illinois. There, Fleming shared everything he knew about penicillin and how to propagate and maintain a specific population of it. The Peoria scientists got to work, using a technique they’d developed that involved a byproduct of corn starch; it grew the Penicillium better than anything tried yet.
The Peoria scientists tested hundreds of Penicillium strains, and they collected microbes from all sorts of moldy food. But the winner came to the lab in the summer of 1943, from a moldy cantaloupe picked up in the town’s fruit market.
An unidentified housewife, who had heard the lab was searching for moldy foods, dropped it off, wondering if it might be useful. Not only was the moldy cantaloupe useful, but the strain it provided proved crucial in treating service members during World War II.
That original “parent” strain of penicillin still lives in the Peoria lab today.
